Besides dressing up your plate and making it look fancy, being a great resource for Vitamin C and a powerful antioxidant, and freshening your breath, a Chinese study found that parsley also makes a great natural food preservative.
It’s actually the parsley’s antioxidants that make it useful as a food preservative. The study compared parsley to the synthetic antioxidant ethoxyquin, which is sometimes used as a food preservative. Western parsley proved to be far superior to the synthetic antioxidant. The study concluded that this natural substance could be useful in the food industry as an additive to extend the shelf life of food products, especially fat-based foods, by preventing them from becoming rancid. Continue reading